127 - Masakhane and Participatory Research for African Languages, with Tosin Adewumi and Perez Ogayo

NLP Highlights

We invited members of Masakhane, Tosin Adewumi and Perez Ogayo, to talk about their EMNLP Findings paper that discusses why typical research is limited for low-resourced NLP and how participatory research can help. As a result of participatory research, Masakhane has many, many success stories: first datasets and benchmarks in African languages, first research on human evaluation specifically for MT for low-resource languages, etc. In this episode, we talked about one of them—MasakhaNER—in more detail. The hosts for this episode are Pradeep Dasigi and Ana Marasović. -------------------------- Tosin Adewumi is a PhD student at the Luleå University of Technology in Sweden. His Twitter handle: @tosintwit Perez Ogayo is an undergrad student at the African Leadership University in Rwanda. Her Twitter handle: @a_ogayo Masakhane is a grassroots organization whose mission is to strengthen and spur NLP research in African languages, for Africans, by Africans: https://www.masakhane.io/ Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languages (Findings of EMNLP 2020): https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02353 MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African languages (AfricaNLP Workshop @ EACL 2021): https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.11811